oneworldtalk

Hard lessons of bilingual education

Bilingual policy was difficult - so MM Lee Kuan Yew learnt. Learning Chinese is not easy. How to make lessons interesting, useful, relevant and ensure that students will continue to use the language and not lose it. They shouldn't be learning the mother tongue just for the purpose of passing examination to qualify for entry to local universities.


http://www.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20091104-177831.html

Related posts :
Mandarin or dialects
Bilingual education

Outspoken Singaporean netizens are having a field day mocking at MM Lee Kuan Yew's realisation that not everyone can master two or more languages at the same level, using his daughter as an example.

While everyone is focussing on MM's admission "mistake" in bilingual policy, how many bilingual or trilingual Singaporeans express thanks for having been nurtured and reap the benefits of being literate in two or more languages. Each person's linguistic ability differ. Some may not have mastered one or both languages either due to home environment, conservative teaching methods, stifling rote learning and pressure from taking many examination subjects. However, there are also some who fail to become effectively bilingual due to lack of motivation, a nice way of saying they did not bother to work hard. I'm sure you have classmates who switch off during mother tongue lessons. No pain, no gain.

I think MM may not be fair to put the blame solely on teachers. It certainly did not take MM Lee more than 30 years to realize his policy error. The education ministry made many changes and experimented with permutations to address the problems that emerged, such as creating a monolingual stream in the 1980s to cater to "slow learners" who were stigmatised and condemned at the age of 10. Yes, the tiny island has lost many intelligent youths who went overseas for secondary and tertiary education because they could not cope or meet the requirement of getting a credit pass in second language for entry to local universities (where there were only two in the 1980s).

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with a two language education policy. Every pragmatic leader or person would choose to learn English as it is a universal working language. To call it a mistake gives ammunition to anti-government Singapore netizens - one mistake leads to another. Or it may be used by the government to justify promoting some aspiring future leaders who are not bilinguists. My understanding is there is no mistake about continuing a bilingual policy, just a better way of executing it to ensure students don't lose interest or drop out of one language or the other.

Some interesting articles on learning English are posted in another thread :
http://www.oneworldtalk.freeforums.org/post8148.html#p8148

Poor man and Jingle Bells noted that netizens are exploiting the frank admission of policy mistake to bash the government on a range of policies that do not meet their expectations.

Do you think that those who opposed the form of bilingual policy have failed to grasp both languages, either due to lack of interest, absence of linguistic flair or plain laziness? Chinese is inherently a difficult language to learn - the strokes, the sequence, the grammar is very different from English and most world languages, and spoken in four tonal voices. If there is no incentive such as material reward or pursuit of love, many students of Chinese language tend to give up or relegate this second language to secondardy importance. For a language requires a lot of memory work and practice, lack of commitment will not sustain the student to acquire the basic reading and writing skills. Most Chinese literate people in the world are aware that Singaporeans who have a credit pass in Chinese at senior high school level admit they could not read beyond the headlines of newspapers, nor would they have any interest in reading Chinese books. In contrast to Hong Kong's bilingual policy, it is mandatory to study Chinese up to senior high school. As students are exposed to Chinese media, they have a higher level of competence in Chinese language but their standard of English differ according to individual's flair, school education and family background.

Another way of reading MM Lee Kuan Yew's statement is that the government should not have let Chinese medium schools died naturally and converted all schools to national stream, i.e., English as the first language, with Chinese either as first or second language depending on students' ability. Enrolment in Chinese medium schools kept falling from the late 1960s onwards and to cut the pain short, the government accelerated the inevitable by merging Chinese and English stream students at junior college / pre-university and the two univesities (Nanyang + SU into NUS) in the late 1970s.

Now that China's economy is booming, peddlers of goods and services from all over the world are lured towards the gold mine. Some have guessed that MM Lee probably regretted not propping up at least some Chinese schools if he had forseen the need to tap the huge Chinese market and act as middleman between East and West. To use the cliche, for those who said : I told you so, hindsight is usually 20/20.

Forum posters : Hot Chilly and others, please refer to my posts on the demise of Chinese education :

http://www.oneworldtalk.freeforums.org/post8189.html#p8189

I told you so.

studying-chinese-too-hard-cited-as-reason-for-migration-t2979.html

Thanks for joining the forum, Richardshow.